NILES — Brandywine Community Schools board officials talked design details Monday night, taking another step toward finalizing concepts for a community center that will serve Brandywine Middle/High School students.

Benton Harbor-based Wightman and Associates was chosen to engineer the project. On Monday night at Brandywine Innovation Academy, company representatives Greg Monberg and Sara Kotanko, visited with the school board and invited them to ask questions about the project’s design plans.

Monberg noted that one issue so far has been the need for acoustical treatment in the gym design.

“When you try to squeeze out every nickel, there is some acoustical treatment inside that space that becomes an echo-chamber and it becomes very loud and can actually be painful for physical education teachers,” Monberg said. “We are looking at different ways to get acoustical treatment in there.”

To combat this, he presented the board with options for covering about 50 percent of the gym walls with an acoustical wall treatment or installing baffles, which are hung from the ceiling and would cost less than wall treatments. Administration will be further discussing the acoustical treatments and Wightman and Associates will be getting cost estimates for both options, Monberg said.

Samples of tile, which will be installed on restroom plumbing walls, were also discussed and will be decided in the future.

Brandywine superintendent Karen Weimer said the meeting represented finalities that district officials have been working to hammer out. The project is expected to go to bid for construction in February. If all goes according to plan, the community center project would break ground in April and be in operation by late December of this year.

“It’s very exciting,” Weimer said. “We have had a lot of meetings with administrators and our architects and we had a workshop in November.”

The project for the community center was proposed in 2016 and has been direly needed by the school community, said Kathy Holy, the district’s director of finance and operations.

Currently, school sports practices have to be divided between the middle/high school gym and the Brandywine Elementary School gym, because so many sports teams are vying for the space. The space issues also mean that sports teams are forced to practice later and sometimes have to practice on only half a court.

The gym at the Brandywine Elementary School also serves the drama department, who has to tear down their production setup each time a game will be taking place in the gym.

With no room for weight lifting classes, the school is currently using a double classroom to serve as the weight lifting area.

But with the new community center on the horizon, students will have less shuffling to do to participate in sports practices, games and play productions.

The community center will be located north of the middle/high school parking and will measure 120 feet by 120 feet. The space will include a gym, with basketball and volleyball courts; weight room; indoor track; changing rooms and restrooms. A corridor will also be constructed to connect the community center with the middle/high school. 

The school will keep its current gym, giving the high school two gym spaces to work with, accommodating the numerous schedules. Because the community center space will also serve the weight lifting department, the school will be able to have two more classrooms available for use.

Brandywine community members will also be permitted to use the indoor track, though Holy said hours for this use have yet to be determined.

As for the theater department, Weimer said the stage area inside the gym at Brandywine Elementary will be designated for their use. Some sound upgrades have been completed and some lighting upgrades are in the works.

The community center project is estimated to cost about $2 million. The funding will mostly be covered by the general fund. A QZAB fund, which is a no interest loan, will cover equipment costs such as new basketball hoops. Money from the Sinking Fund, which was passed in 2016, will cover about 10 percent of the building’s cost.

Weimer said the district also hopes to write some grants to cover some of the cost.